Blood Ninja (26 page)

“Anyway,” Heiko went on, “the priest tried to help Hoichi …” She paused. “This is a famous story. You’ve really never heard it?”

“No.”

“Honestly. What are they teaching peasant boys these days?”

Taro laughed. “I’m very good at hunting rabbits.”

Heiko smiled. “So … the priest, he wrote on Hoichi with his brush and ink—the Sanskrit text of the Heart Sutra, to protect the blind man from the ghosts, which he said would be unable to see him due to the power of the symbols. Does any of this sound familiar?”

“Gods,” said Taro. “That’s where Shusaku got the idea.”

“Presumably. But he is as arrogant and presumptuous as ever.” She said this, despite the harshness of the words, with a sort of sad admiration. “He tempts the fates.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

“The priest forgot to paint Hoichi’s ears. When the ghosts came for him, they ripped them off, and he died of blood loss. That is why the story is called Hoichi the Earless.”

Taro let out a long breath. “I see,” he said.

But
your eyes will betray you
was what he thought. Like Hoichi, Shusaku had failed to cover one part of his body with the text. Was that what the abbess had seen? Would his eyes give him away to an evil spirit—to a ghost, or a ninja? Taro felt a chill run through him at the thought, but he smiled for Heiko’s benefit.

“We’re going to the mountain, though, aren’t we?” he said. “It’s the ninja’s lair. There couldn’t be anywhere safer.”

“Let’s hope so,” said Heiko, and then fell silent, and didn’t speak again for a
ri
or more, as they crossed over increasingly steep terrain.

Soon they entered the final valley before the entrance to the
sacred mountain. Shusaku cautioned them all to move with more care than ever before. It was here, near to the ninja’s secret encampment, that it was most crucial to preserve secrecy.

Silently they crept past a dark village. Smoke rose from one chimney. The others were still and cold. As they walked along the bottom of an irrigation ditch, a heron startled and took loudly to the air. Taro, panicked, dropped to the ground before he saw the silhouette of the bird crossing the waning moon.

It was only when they were climbing the terraced steps of rice paddies, the village houses below and behind them, as small as children’s toys, that Taro realized he had dropped his bow in the ditch.

He gestured to Shusaku, who tutted when Taro told him what he had done. “An ordinary bow? Bad enough. But a Tokugawa bow? There is no way to explain its presence if someone finds it.”

“I know,” said Taro. “I’m sorry.” And of course it was not only that it was a Tokugawa bow that frightened him—it was the idea that it might, just might, contain the Buddha ball. For a peasant to come across it would be disastrous. He felt his pulse quickening, and reminded himself that a peasant might not notice the thickness of the grip. He hadn’t, and neither had Shusaku. Only the noble girl had seen it.

And then, the Buddha ball didn’t exist, anyway.

Probably.

He bit his lip. “I’ll go back and get it. You wait here with Hiro and the girls.”

Shusaku resisted for a moment, but Taro was insistent. Eventually the ninja relented. “Go, but be quick.”

Taro headed back down the valley toward the village. He moved fast, keeping low to the ground, trying to minimize the part of him framed by the moon.

Then he saw it, a shadow moving between the trees. He could also hear singing; the toneless, tuneless song of a man who has consumed too much rice wine. Taro melted behind a tree, following the voice. As he drew closer, he could see that the man was carrying something.

A bow.

The man was singing a song of his own invention. “Found a bow, gonna hide it; wouldn’t want my wife to find it; found a bow, gonna sell it; wouldn’t want my wife to … benefit. Ha, ha! Good one, Ito!”

Taro wondered for a moment who Ito was, then realized that the man was talking to himself. Taro considered his options. The peasant was drunk, clearly. He might not remember finding the bow, if Taro knocked him out and took it from him. And even if
he told anyone, they probably wouldn’t believe him. Taro knew from growing up in a village himself that a man who was drunk like this on his own one night was likely to be drunk on other nights too. Most likely, he was well known for it.

Taro searched the thicket floor as he insinuated himself between the trees. Soon he found what he was looking for, a heavy branch. He’d sneak up behind the man and give him one hard blow to the back of the head.

He hoped he could do it without killing him.

Ahead of him, the man was walking toward the end of the thicket, into moonlight. Taro quickened his pace. It would be better to ambush him in the trees.

But when he caught up, the drunkard was standing at the door of a small wooden building, standing on the other side of the thicket from the village. As Taro watched, he slid open a metal bolt and opened the door, then threw the bow inside. Taro had just the time to see a mound of shimmering white inside, glowing in the moonlight.

A rice store.

The man shut the door again, muttering. “Said I was lazy.… I’ll show them. Bow mus’ be worth a fortune. ‘Look at Ito!’ they said. ‘He fell in the ditch! What a fool!’ I’ll show ’em foolish. They only
think
I fell. Really a
kami
mus’ have given me a push, so’s I’d find the bow. Prob’ly it’s magic—or it belongs to the shogun, or something. There’ll be a reward, oh, yes!”

And with that, he put a key into the bolt and slammed it home, locking the door.

Taro cursed. This made things more difficult. But not impossible. He would overpower the peasant, take his key, and quickly recover his bow from—

A group of staggering men rounded the corner of the thicket and burst into derisive laughter when they saw the man Taro had been following. Taro ducked behind a bush.

“Ito!” one of the men shouted. “Got out of the ditch, did you? What are you doing here? Surely you prefer dark, muddy places?”

Taro cursed. This wasn’t the village drunkard—the whole
village
was drunk. It must have been some kind of festival for the end of the
obon
holiday.

“Hilarious,” said the man who had hidden the bow. “Tha’s really hilarious. Ackshually I was jus’ enjoying a stroll in the moonlight.”

“Well,” said another of the men, clapping Taro’s intended prey on the back, “why don’t you stroll with us back to the village. Your wife is asking after you. Said if you didn’t come home you’d be living in the ditch on a more permanent basis.”

Grumbling, the man went with them, taking the path that skirted the thicket to return to the village.

And with that, the key, and Taro’s bow, were gone.

Taro didn’t know why he lied.

When he returned to the others, Shusaku asked him if he’d found the bow, and he said no—he had searched the ditch from top to bottom and seen no sign of it. Perhaps he was afraid of Shusaku’s anger, if he ever discovered that the bow might be more than an heirloom, or perhaps he only wanted to solve his problems himself, for once.

For whatever reason, he didn’t feel that he could tell Shusaku the bow was in a rice store, hidden by a drunken fool.

“You’re sure you dropped it when the heron took flight?” asked Shusaku.

“No,” Taro replied. “Now that I think about it, it seems possible that I left it in the cave.” He had been walking behind. He trusted that Shusaku might not have seen whether he was carrying the bow or not. At the same time, he listened to the words coming out of his mouth as if it were another speaking. Why lie to the ninja?

Yet this was something Taro knew he had to do alone. His
bow, his birthright, his responsibility. He remembered something too from when Heiko and Yukiko were talking to Hiro of their training.

Heiko had mentioned lock-picking.

“Well,” said Shusaku, “if it’s at the cave, then we are safe. No one knows of its location besides the ninja. Let us hope that’s where you left it.” He gave Taro a hard look and turned to carry on up the valley.

Soon the rice paddies gave way to rock, lonely pine trees, and moss. The air was thin and made for hard going. Even Taro and Shusaku, with their vampire blood, began to breathe heavily. They reached a meadow in which grew wild orchids, daisies, and poppies. Shusaku stopped.

“We’ve arrived,” he said. He pointed to a simple wooden hut that lay at the end of the meadow, abutting the bottom of a sheer-sided gray cliff. Aside from the hut, there was no other visible habitation.

Taro, Hiro, Heiko, and Yukiko looked around, confused. “It’s just a hut,” said Hiro.

The rock wall rose high above them, and seemed to continue round on either side, as if to bar the way to the summit. A thin covering of snow lay on the ground.

Shusaku smiled. He spread his hands, indicating the scene, turning as he did so. They were standing on high ground. Taro realized how high only now that he turned and looked back down the valley. Below them, hills stretched into the distance, as low and pale as sand dunes. The tops of the trees at the tree line were a long way down, and the trees themselves seemed tiny.

In fact, this was the highest point for miles, as far as Taro could see. Only the side where the cliff stood was cut off from view. On the other three sides they looked on the world from above, like crows.

In the midst of this high-land desolation, the hut stood alone, as if some mad hermit had taken it upon himself to live in this isolated place, high above everyone else.

“This is where our journey ends,” said Shusaku. He led them up the meadow to the hut.

“You’re telling us this is the ninja base?” asked Hiro. “I was hoping for something a bit grander.”

Shusaku smiled at him and opened the door.

Taro looked at Hiro. Hiro shrugged and followed Shusaku through the door. Taro went after him, the girls behind. The hut was dark inside, and smelled of damp earth. Taro looked around. The walls were bare. There was no furniture. The only feature in the room was a square rug on the floor. Of Shusaku, there was no sign at all.

“Where’d he go?” asked Hiro, bewildered.

“I don’t know.” Taro lifted a corner of the rug.

Just then Shusaku’s voice came up to them from below the floor. “Under the rug,” he said. “There’s a trapdoor.”

Taro lifted the rug and, sure enough, underneath it was a small wooden door with a heavy metal ring set into it. He tugged upward, revealing an opening into darkness. Taro sat down, lowering his legs into the hole. His feet found stone steps, apparently cut into the very rock of the mountain.

“Spooky,” said Yukiko from behind him. “We’ll be like Hoichi down there—blind, and probably surrounded by ghosts.”

“Thanks,” said Taro. “I feel much better now.”

He descended a few steps, holding the trapdoor up with one hand so that Hiro and the girls could squeeze under too. The door slammed shut behind them, plunging them into midnight darkness.

“Feel your way along the wall,” came Shusaku’s disembodied voice. “Soon you’ll see me.”

Taro carried on down, plagued by the uncomfortable sensation of descending into one of samsara’s hellish worlds: the realm of the demons, perhaps. The darkness was absolute, an almost tangible thing that lay heavily on his skin like silk.

Something brushed against him, and he bit off a scream when he realized that it was Hiro, holding on to his hand. The gesture—so
simple, so childlike—filled him with a rush of fondness for his old friend.

“I never told you,” whispered Hiro. “I’m afraid of the dark.”

Taro smiled. “Me too. But it’ll be over soon.”

“Did you just say you were afraid of the dark, Hiro?” asked Yukiko. “And there I was hoping that the big strong wrestler would look after me. I guess I got it the wrong way around. The big strong wrestler needs a girl to look after
him
.”

Hiro grunted. “It’s a good job it’s so dark in here, or you’d be in trouble.” Then he yelped and bashed into Taro. “What hit me?” he demanded, in a voice that was unmistakably frightened.

“It’s a good job I don’t need light to see
you
,” said Yukiko. “You take up the whole tunnel. If it doesn’t widen up a little, you might get stuck down here
forever
…”

Hiro laughed, hollowly. “The sooner we’re out of this tunnel the better. For me, anyway. Not for Yukiko. She’s dead meat.”

Taro didn’t feel much better than Hiro. His fingers were trailing lightly along a cold, damp wall, whose rough striations of stone scraped against his fingertips. The surface was clammy to the touch, and Taro had an irrational fear that his hand might suddenly touch not wall but flesh—the face and teeth of a demon, lurking in a recess, or the gnarled hand of a monstrous old man waiting to pounce on him. He was reminded unpleasantly of a game he had played with his mother once. In the darkness, when the fire had gone out, she had proffered several open bags, asked him to put his hand in and guess the contents only from touch. There had been worms in one, a starfish, a squid. One of them had held a piece of whale blubber, smooth and gelatinous to the touch. Taro had squealed with boyish pleasure at this game, but it had scared him too, for in the second before he guessed, before his guess was confirmed or denied, the bag could contain anything his imagination supplied. A nest of baby snakes, a severed hand, an organ of some kind.